Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Google today celebrating Søren Peder Lauritz Sørensen, the chemist responsible for introducing the pH scale to the world, with an interactive Google Doodle.

S. P. L. Sørensen (9 January 1868 – 12 February 1939) was a Danish chemist, famous for the introduction of the concept of pH, a scale for measuring acidity and alkalinity. He was born in Havrebjerg, Denmark.

From 1901 to 1938 he was head of the prestigious Carlsberg Laboratory, Copenhagen. While working at the Carlsberg Laboratory he studied the effect of ion concentration on proteins, and because the concentration of hydrogen ions was particularly important, he introduced the pH-scale as a simple way of expressing it in 1909. The article in which he introduced the scale (using the notation pH), described two new methods for measuring acidity. The first method was based on electrodes, while the second involved comparing the colours of samples and a preselected set of indicators.